Your eyes only

By Helen BradleyFebruary 15 2003
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When you spend a lot of time browsing the web you'll appreciate having everything you need at your fingertips and your browser tweaked to suit how you work. Like other programs, your browser can be customised in many helpful, and some just plain pretty, ways.

When you visit a website, the graphics and text files that make up each page are downloaded to your computer and stored in its cache. The larger the size of your cache, the more files can be stored in it. This means that pages you visit frequently will display faster because some, or all, of the page's files will already be stored on your computer.

Unless disk space is at a premium, give your browser a healthy-sized cache to optimise your speed. In Internet Explorer, choose Tools, Internet Options, Settings and use the slider to adjust the amount of disk space allocated to the cache. In Netscape Navigator, choose Edit, Preferences and open the Advanced option. Click Cache and you can set a size for your disk cache by typing a value into the dialog. Internet Explorer allows you to customise its toolbar by adding additional buttons and removing those you don't use. Right-click the toolbar and select Customize. Add new buttons by selecting them in the left-hand window and click Add. Similarly, any unwanted buttons appearing in the right-hand window can be removed by selecting them and clicking Remove. One handy button you may consider adding is a Print Preview button.

Internet Explorer also includes a handy Links toolbar, which you can customise by adding your favourite sites so they're easier to get to. Display it by choosing View, Toolbars, Links and notice that it comes already populated with many links. Remove links you don't want by right-clicking the link and choose Delete. Adding a new link is as simple as viewing the page, then dragging the icon to the left of the page's address in the Address bar and dropping it into place on the Links bar. You can also add a menu of links to your Links bar by creating a Windows\Links folder and add your links to that.

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By default, hyperlinks appear as blue underlined text in the browser window. However, this can be altered to any colour combination you like. In Internet Explorer, choose Tools, Internet Options, General tab, Colors button. In the Links area, click the colour box for the Visited or Unvisited links and choose another colour from the palette. In Netscape Navigator, choose Edit, Preferences, open the Appearance list and choose the Color option. Click the colour boxes to alter the colours for Visited and Unvisited links and disable the Underline links checkbox to remove underlining from links, if desired. Further down the dialog is an option that lets you apply your chosen colours in preference to any specified by the page designer. This option isn't available in Internet Explorer.

Skin your browser

If you've used Windows Media Player a lot, you're probably familiar with skins, the small programs you download and install which let you change how the application looks. While Windows Media Player skins often reduce the program window to a small size, those for Internet Explorer won't, because screen size is vital for pleasurable browsing.

What they will do, however, is to give you a picture behind your buttons to replace the grey background. Products such as the shareware Skinner 3.0 let you preview the skin before applying it and work with versions 4 through to 6 of Internet Explorer. Netscape uses the term "themes" rather than skins but the result is the same. Netscape 7 comes with two existing themes, Modern and Classic. Modern is the default screen display and Classic takes your screen back to the days of Netscape 4. To change theme, click View, Apply Theme, Classic. You'll see a prompt indicating that the change will take place when you next start Netscape, so close the program and reopen it to see the theme. There are also themes available for download from the Netscape website - my personal favourite is Toy Factory - but others are available at sites such as MozDEv.